Jeff Abbott - No Rest for the Dead

“Shit!” A large black man tried to restrain Rosemary’s convulsing body.

One of the technicians yelled, “It’s her arm! Look at the swelling. Jesus!”

“The straps are too tight,” the warden said, “Only a fraction of the chemical is getting through. You’re killing her-slowly! Get it off- now !”

One of the tie-down team tugged the strap off Rosemary’s arm so fast it snagged the IV and the needle whipped through the air like a snake spitting poison.

“What is wrong with you people?” the warden bellowed, his face red. “There are state officials out there- and reporters-watching this! Jesus Christ!” He backed away to avoid a face full of paralyzing Pavulon.

Rosemary’s heart was beating normally again and she watched all the drama around her as if it were some black comedy. Her joints ached and her muscles burned. But her mind was surprisingly clear.

“You okay?” the technician asked, and she nodded.

The chaplain was back, his hand on Rosemary’s forehead. “It’s okay, dear. It’s okay.” Then he started to pray as the technician got the catheters in place and Rosemary lay back against the pillow.

Belle McGuire turnedto Nunn. She was still crying. “Make them stop. Please make them stop!”

“Not the first time I’ve seen something go wrong,” one of the reporters said, shaking his head. “It’ll get back on track in a few minutes.”

Belle’s face twisted with pain.

But Jon Nunn couldn’t wait a few minutes. He pounded his fist on the glass. “Stop this! Stop it now!”

A guard was beside him in seconds. “Sir, you will have to leave if you don’t-”

Nunn took one last half swing at the glass, then let his hand drop, and stared at the floor, taking fast, hard breaths.

The curtains openedand once again Rosemary looked at the witnesses. She tried to smile at Belle, then, scanning the windows, she found Jon Nunn, who leaned forward and pressed his hands against the glass-something he was not supposed to do, but this time no one stopped him.

It was not at all as she’d imagined-some drug-induced stupor followed by sleep. Instead, Rosemary Thomas had become hyperaware of her body, air going in and out of her lungs, bubbles of oxygen traveling along veins and arteries, heart pumping loud and clear, images sparking in her brain-her father laid up in bed; her mother smoking a cigarette at his funeral; her children, Ben and Leila, calling to her; the iron maiden; a blood-soaked blouse; Christopher’s face, his finger; words, colors, everything whirling and mixing. She saw the district attorney looking solemn and the pain on the judge’s face and the guards and the doctor and the reporters staring but not really looking.

Now she knew what was happening. Her breathing had become labored and a sudden coldness surrounded her heart. Just before her eyes closed, she saw Belle McGuire crying and Jon Nunn’s face, his fingertips pressed against the glass like white, fluttering moths. It was as if his hand were on her arm.

She wanted to call out, but it was impossible: she couldn’t speak. A noise, like air going out of a balloon, filled Rosemary’s ears, and she knew it was her last breath, and then her heart turned to ice and cracked and broke apart and the world went bright white and she was flying.

The McFall Art Museum was closed for the night. Down in the main galleries the security lights were on, throwing bright, ugly puddles of light on the doors and hallways. It was very different from the careful track lighting of the day, lovingly trained on the paintings and sculptures that lined the rooms to show them at their best, without glare or shadow. The illumination from these nighttime lights was harsh, hard-edged. The garish pools of light they threw made the museum seem darker somehow, more strange and threatening than a building filled with great art should have been.

It was not a big museum, but it had made a name for itself in San Francisco, “the gem of the Bay Area,” people called it, “an undiscovered treasure trove of art from nearly every era.”

Near the marble staircase that led to the second floor, the sharply outlined shadow of a statue fell across the floor, the figure of a nude athlete holding half a javelin. The athlete had been dead for almost twenty-five hundred years, and his javelin had been broken for seventeen hundred, but still he stood poised for his throw. With the glare of the security light on his marble skin, that throw seemed imminent, adding to the strange sense of foreboding.

From the far end of the back gallery an eerie sound fluttered across the spotless tile floors. It echoed off the hard surfaces of the floor and walls until it was almost impossible to recognize it for what it was-the sound of a cheap radio playing a ball game. Moments later, the sound was joined by the scuffle of the night guard’s feet as he walked back to the security station at the front door, where he put the radio down beside a bank of video monitors. The guard settled into his chair, just in time for the louder gabble of a tire commercial.

The sound echoed up to the first landing of the marble staircase but somehow failed to turn the corner and make it to the second floor. At the top of the stairs greater darkness waited to join the sudden silence. The pools of shadow were swept aside by one security light halfway down a hallway lined with office doors. The entire length of the hallway stood prey to the shadows, half dim and half lit by the small and ugly light from that one bare lamp.

All the way down at the far end of the hall, one additional pool of light spilled out into the hallway from the half-open door of the corner office. It was a much warmer light, though not terribly bright. Then, quite suddenly, the light went out. For several moments nothing else happened: no sound, no sign of any living thing moving anywhere near the corner office-but the careful observer might have noticed a strange, dark blue-purple glow coming from inside the room. Without really lighting anything properly, the glow somehow caused the lettering on the office door to jump out in almost three-dimensional clarity:

CHRISTOPHER THOMAS

Curator

From the doorway, there was almost nothing to see in the darkness of the curator’s office. The walls reflected a faint texture that had to be books, hundreds of them, lining the room from the floor all the way up beyond the reach of a normal human being. They seemed to loom above the room, holding in and magnifying the tense emptiness that gripped this museum tonight. And faintly visible in the dim blue-purple glow was one end of a large leather couch.

At the other end of the room was a large draftsman’s table with a lamp suspended above it on a gooseneck, and from this lamp came the glow. It shone down on a canvas stretched out on the table, and it reflected strangely off the thick, square glasses worn by the man who leaned over the canvas. When the young woman beside him opened her mouth to take a ragged breath, it lit up her teeth with a brilliant and otherworldly sheen.

“It’s quite clear under the ultraviolet light,” the man said. Something about the way he said his words made them sound stilted, as if he were reading from a script, but the young woman didn’t notice. She was staring at his hands as they hovered just above the canvas. Like the rest of the man, his hands were long and angular and strong. “Here,” he said, “and again, here.” He moved his hand in a choppy half circle over the lower corner of the canvas.

The young woman ran her tongue out and across her full lower lip. She looked closely at him, the light casting strange shadows into the angles of a face not classically handsome-the slightly hooked nose, the too thin lips-yet something about him was beautiful, beautiful and dangerous.